Solution Briefs

All-flash virtual SAN offers an alternative high-performance, shared storage solution without the need to buy an expensive purposed-built, all-flash array that may also require a complex storage network. The combination of VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 with Lenovo System x M5 servers, Optimus Ascend and Optimus MAX SSDs provides an all-flash shared storage solution which is integrated into the productive and well-understood vSphere environment.

All of us are facing significant storage issues. According to a survey by IDC, the top three pain points of IT professionals are: meeting business Service Level Agreements (SLAs), troubleshooting storage issues, and limited budget increases to address those storage issues.1 Meanwhile, demand for storage capacity is growing dramatically, and is expected to grow at 40% per year over the next two years.2

These facts lead to a number of storage management challenges including: the need to meet SLAs in the face of massive growth in both applications and storage demand, the need to be more agile with storage provisioning, and the need to reduce storage complexity.

VMware vSAN was designed to help customers address these challenges by being simple to configure and manage while being highly cost-effective, enabling customers to cut their storage CAPEX costs by up to 50%.3

All-Flash vSAN

VMware vSAN 6 was also designed to enable customers to achieve predictable, high performance with an all-flash configuration – that is, flash for caching as well as for primary storage capacity. In this solution, SanDisk‘s high performance, high endurance Optimus Ascend™ SSD is used for caching and SanDisk’s 4TB* Optimus MAX™ - that is certified for vSAN 6 - is used for storage capacity. By combining Lenovo’s powerful and versatile 2U two-socket System x3650 M5 servers with SanDisk SSDs and VMware all-flash vSAN, organizations can now deploy an all-flash solution at a much lower cost than a traditional all-flash storage array. The consistent high performance of this all-flash vSAN design is a compelling choice for running business-critical applications and databases at a lower cost basis compared to a traditional all-flash storage array.

Performance and Scalability

High performance is key to executing business-critical applications successfully, but equally as important to business success is consistency of performance. The allflash vSAN running on Lenovo servers with SanDisk SSDs showcases excellent performance with high consistency. To measure performance, the HammerDB performance tuning and benchmarking tool was used to run a 5000 Warehouse workload on each VM in this 4-node configuration with SQL Server Database. This system delivered 14.1 million transactions per minute (TPM) and 3.08 million New Orders per Minute (NOPMs) using 8 VMs executing Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition.

VM Name

HammerDB TPM

HammerDB NOPM

SQL Instance - 1

1,735,133

377,315

SQL Instance - 2

1,755,455

381,685

SQL Instance - 3

1,708,467

371,452

SQL Instance - 4

1,702,747

370,169

SQL Instance - 5

1,906,503

427,555

SQL Instance - 6

1,787,288

389,258

SQL Instance - 7

1,794,507

390,157

SQL Instance - 8

1,707,570

371,057

Total

14,097,670

3,078,648

The configuration used for the performance test is summarized below.

Lenovo System x3650 M5 with E5-2650v3 processors and 384 GB system memory and M5210 RAID controller

Two vSAN disk groups each with:

Caching: One Optimus Ascend SAS SSD (800 GB)

Capacity: Two Optimus MAX SAS SSD (3.84 TB)

Two VMs per server with 16 vCPUs and 96 GB of memory running two instances of DB server

Ten disk files @ 1150 GB total for each VM

120 GB for Windows 2012 R2

1030 GB for SQL Server

vSphere™ 6.0 Enterprise with vSAN 6.0

Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition

SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition

Conclusion

The combination of VMware vSAN 6.0 with Lenovo System x M5 servers, Optimus Ascend and Optimus MAX SSDs provides an all-flash shared storage solution which is integrated into the productive and well-understood vSphere environment. All-flash vSAN offers an alternative high-performance, shared storage solution without the need to buy an expensive purposed-built, all-flash array that may also require a complex storage network.

As shown in this solution brief with 5000 Warehouse workload, this all-flash storage configuration can deliver the predictable, high performance of flash storage at a much lower cost than traditional flash-based storage arrays and provides a very capable and suitable alternative for running business critical applications and databases.